Friday 23 February 2018

Coleridge's Claudian Marginalium




:1:

Coleridge owned an edition of Claudian's poems, and it may have been the one pictured above. Which is to say: it was either that 1677 edition, or an earlier 1650 one, both texts edited by Nicolaas Heinsius. We can't be sure, because Coleridge's actual copy has been lost, but Mrs J H Green who saw the book when compiling her Handlist of Coleridge's Books (1863) says it was the 1677 edition. Then again, Thomas Arnold (son of the famous headmaster, father of Mrs Humphrey Ward and grandfather of Aldous Huxley) actually owned the copy for a time, and he says this:
I have in my possession a very interesting memorial of the intimacy between Coleridge & Southey. It is an Elzevir edition 1650 of Claudianus having on the front fly leaf in schoolboy hand ‘E. Libris R Southey / Regiae Scholae Westminest. / AD 1788’ and below this ‘S.T.Coleridge / from Robert Southey / June 10. 1810’ in Southey's handwriting. [Letter to Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 12 December 1884]
The text of the 1650 edition is the same as that of the 1677; but I dilate upon this seemingly trivial point because the frontispieces were different. The 1677 has the bare-buttocked, racy image above, where the 1650 has this much worthier, duller illustration:



There is a point in all this pettifogging, and I'll come back to it in a minute. But first, the meat of my post.


:2:

So: the rest of Arnold's letter explains that ‘the book was purchased some years ago at a booksellers in London’ and that it contains a handwritten comment by Coleridge ‘at the end’ (so, presumably, on the back flyleaf)—‘I have verified the handwriting at the M.S. room in British Museum’, he says. Arnold then copies out Coleridge's comment:
She sate as square and solemn as an empty chair when you look at it in a half dreamy Mood—. On the reproach of shedding tears, for a Lady in Pain? Loss of Fortune? Any other cause respecting myself principally? Immediate peril of death? No! never—but treachery unkindness unmerited & implying want of believed goodness, in an instantaneous impression of [?others/those/their] sufferings which my imagination could not limit [?to] a noble act...a Sunset &c &c &c
This is quoted from George Whalley's edition of Coleridge's Marginalia [2:45]. I haven't seen the actual letter (it's at the University of Texas), but Whalley notes that ‘the writing of the original is somewhat difficult to decipher’.

Whalley thinks this is a personal expression of Coleridgean anguish. He notes that STC, in his more despairing moods, accused Sara Hutchinson of ‘unkindness unmerited’ and general ‘unresponsiveness’, and speculates that this might be another little iteration of his hopeless love for Asra. Why, you ask, would he scribble such a thing in the back of the copy of Claudian his friend Southey had given him? The answer is: there's no reason why he would, except that he did sometimes jot odd and unrelated things in books he had to hand (though it should be said, the vast majority of his marginalia relates to the specific works in which they are written). At any rate, Whalley tentatively flexes the metaphorical muscles of his idea.
‘She’ may recall the letter ש‬ (shin) the initial letter of C's anagram of ‘Hutchinson’, which he sometimes used alone as her name ... ‘She’ could be a disguise for Coleridge himself. Yet it is also possible that this agitated note does not record any actual or personal incident, but may rather be a sketch for a poem, or for a dramatic episode. [Whalley, Coleridge Marginalia (Routledge/Princeton U P 1984), 2:45]
I'm going to bump Whalley's ‘yet it is also possible that’ to ‘it is much more likely that’, and indulge in a little speculation of my own. Of course we cannot be sure what the marginalium means, but I wonder if this is Coleridge starting to tinker with the notion of a poem inspired by, or perhaps even a continuation of, Claudian's most famous work, the unfinished epic de raptu Proserpinae, ‘The Rape of Prosperpine’ (AD 395-97).

Claudian's poem a retelling of the myth of Pluto's abduction of the beautiful Proserpina, the Roman version of the Greek myth in which Hades abducts Persephone. Book 1 is set in the underworld, Pluto raging that he has been left wifeless for so long. He demands that Jove provide one, and Jove chooses Prosperina, daughter of Ceres (the goddess of agriculture, fertility and motherhood), instructing Venus to tempt the girl away from her house so that Pluto can nab her. Book 2 starts with Venus, and the two virgin goddesses Diana and Pallas, leading Prosperina into sunny meads to gather flowers. A huge cleft (‘hiatus immensus’ [2:187]) opens abruptly in the earth, Pluto rides through in his chariot, snatches Proserpina and hurtles away. The two virgin goddesses were not expecting this, and try to stop it—Pallas bangs Pluto's chariot with her shield—but there's nothing they can do. Proserpina is understandably distraught.
Interea volucri fertur Proserpina curru
caesariem diffusa Noto planctuque lacertos
verberat et questus ad nubila tendit inanes:
... ‘o fortunatas alii quascumque tulere
raptores ! saltem communi sole fruuntur.
sed mihi virginitas pariter caelumque negatur,
eripitur cum luce pudor, terrisque relictis
servitum Stygio ducor captiva tyranno.’ [2:247-64]

Proserpine is carried off away in the flying chariot, her hair blown back by the wind, beating her arms in grief and calling in vain remonstrance to the clouds: ... ‘How fortunate are those girls seized by other rapists; for they at least can still enjoy the broad light of day, while I, together with my virginity, relinquish the very air of heaven; both innocence and daylight are stolen from me. I have no choice but to leave this world behind me and be carried a captive bride to serve the tyrant of Stygius.’
Pluto is moved to tears by her lament, and wipes his eyes with his ‘rusty cloak’ (‘ferrugineus amictus’ [2:275]). Not that he lets her go, mind. No: the chariot rides on into Tartarus, where Pluto marries the poor girl. Book 2 closes with them in their bridal chamber together.

In Book 3 Ceres dreams of her daughter, miserable and rebuking her for her abandonment, and wakes in terror. She hurries to Prosperina's house and discovers it empty, spiders'-webs covering her daughter's loom.
Ut domus excubiis incustodita remotis
et resupinati neglecto cardine postes
flebilis et tacitae species adparuit aulae ...,
haeserunt lacrimae; nec vox aut spiritus oris
redditur, atque imis vibrat tremor ossa medullis;
succidui titubant gressus; foribusque reclusis,
dum vacuas sedes et desolata pererravit
atria. [3:146-55]

When she she saw the unguarded house, its gatekeepers gone, the rusted hinges, the doorposts knocked flat, and the sad state of the silent halls ... she could not weep, nor speak, nor even breathe; a trembling shook the very marrow of her bones; her faltering steps stumbled. She threw open the doors and wandered through the empty rooms and deserted halls.
That description makes me think not just that Tennyson knew this poem (he'd studied Claudian at school, and translated portions of his verse before he was fourteen), but that he was specifically alluding to it in ‘Mariana’ (1830). But I don't want to get distracted. In the poem: Ceres finds an old nurse who relates what happened to Proserpina, and then, like a Hyrcan tiger [3:263], goes raging along the flanks of Mount Olympus demanding that her daughter be restored to her. That's where the poem ends.


:3:

Clearly, Claudian planned a longer work: presumably a six-book epic (maybe a twelve-book epic, although it might have been a stretch filling out so many hexameters with what remains to be told). The rest of the story is well-known: Ceres, heartbroken, refuses to let cereal crops grow, and the people starve, until Jove resolves to restore her daughter to her. Pluto reluctantly gives his bride up, but tricks her by giving her twelve pomegranate seeds to eat. Having eaten the food of the Underworld Proserpina is compelled to return there, but because she only eats six of the seeds she only returns for half the year. None of that is in Claudian's unfinished poem.

So let's return to Coleridge's Claudian marginalium.
She sate as square and solemn as an empty chair when you look at it in a half dreamy Mood—. On the reproach of shedding tears, for a Lady in Pain? Loss of Fortune? Any other cause respecting myself principally? Immediate peril of death? No! never—but treachery unkindness unmerited & implying want of believed goodness, in an instantaneous impression of [?others/those/their] sufferings which my imagination could not limit [?to] a noble act...a Sunset &c &c &c
Let's imagine that these are the first, very tentative thoughts for a continuation of De Raptu Proserpinae. ‘She’, here, would be Ceres, hollowed out with grief by the loss of her daughter. The empty chair would be the one mentioned in Claudian's poem, unoccupied before Proserpina's loom. We might even take an extra step of imagining that Coleridge is doodling a little verse-doggerel, much as he did with a couple of lines of the Iliad. That would give us:
She sate as square
And solemn as
An empty chair
When you look at
In a half dreamy Mood—
...which is the kind of thing easy to spin-on:
She sate as square
And solemn as
An empty chair
Look'd all on as
In half dreamy Mood
Bereft of her brood
Virginal and fair
All stol'n chicks
Beyond the Styx
Voided by her despairs
As empty chairs ...
and so on. But this isn't the direction in which Coleridge goes.

Instead (to continue my speculation) the thought of Ceres cast-down and weeping leads Coleridge to ponder a tearful woman as a topic for a poem. He jots down a possible title: ‘On the Reproach of Shedding Tears, for a Lady in Pain’. From that title we'd imagine a poem repudiating reproach. But why is the woman in this poem crying? Has she been threatened with death? But STC refuses to believe a true lady would ever weep for such a selfish reason (‘No! never’), so instead he tabulates a few of the things that might make the lady cry: the treachery of others; unmerited unkindness; an undeserved loss of reputation (‘implying want of believed goodness’). The first of these might be carrying on the Proserpina/Ceres story, as might the second, although less pointedly (though the third moves us in a different direction). Then there's a slightly obscure fourth reason for possible grief: ‘an instantaneous impression of those sufferings which [my] imagination could not limit to a noble act’—something to do with empathy with the sufferings of others (let's say: her daughter), which is a perfectly good reason to cry, although I'm not sure to what the noble act might refer.

But it's actually the final open-ended reference to ‘...a Sunset &c &c &c’ that seals the deal for me. Because at the unfinished end of De Raptu Proserpina, Ceres demands to know why she is weeping, and promises to roam the world broadcasting her grief:
Largis tunc imbribus ora madescunt.
quid ? tantum dignum fieri dignumque taceri?
hei mihi, discedunt omnes. quid vana moraris
ulterius? non bella palam caelestia sentis?
quin potius natam pelago terrisque requiris? ...
non Rheni glacies, non me Riphaea tenebunt
frigora; non dubio Syrtis cunctabitur aestu.
stat finem penetrare Noti Boreaeque nivalem
vestigare domum; primo calcabitur Atlas
occasu facibusque meis lucebit Hydaspes.’ [3:311-25]

Copious tears then fell like rain down her cheeks. ‘Why these tears?’ [she asked herself], ‘why this silence? Woe is me; everyone else has abandoned me. Why do you stay here to no purpose? Can't you see it is open war between you and heaven now? Wouldn't it be better to search sea and land for your daughter? ... Neither the glacier-clogged Rhine nor Alpine frosts shall prevent me; the dubious tides of Syrtes shall not hold me back. I am determined to penetrate the fastnesses of the South, and to explore the snowy home of Boreas, the North Wind. I will climb Mount Atlas on the brink of sunset and illuminate Hydaspes’ stream with my torches.
That's Ceres saying: I shall go to the extreme south and the extreme north, to the extreme west (the sunset on Atlas) and the extreme east (The Hydaspes river was where Alexander the Great enjoyed his last victory, annexing the Punjab to his empire) to search for my daughter. I'm speculating that Coleridge reading these lines, began to think about continuing them, or writing something inspired by them: tears—Sunset—&c &c &c

Which brings me back to the pettifogging note on which I opened this blogpost. Does it matter which edition Coleridge owned? Of course not, except that the 1650 edition presents a dully respectable face to the world, where the 1677 dramatically and indeed rather lubriciously represents the moment of Proserpina's abduction, the trauma that leads to the empty chair, the grief of the mother and the resolution to search as far as the sunset to recover her. Might it not have been a prompt to Coleridge's imagination, howsoever abbreviated?

Thursday 22 February 2018

Coleridge Blog Reanimation



Last year was a period of latency for this blog, pretty much. After a number of years of fairly intensive mining of the Cole Ridge, I spent 2017 working on other things. But there are glimmers of life in the blog again now. You see, having put a couple of other projects to bed, I'm revving up to work on a funded research project to do with Coleridge's Latin. That means I'm going to start blogging here again, testing ideas, jotting things down, writing posts. If the archive of material on this blog constitutes a string of often heroically abstruse and reader-unfriendly lucubrations, I can promise that what's going to follow will be considerably more abstruse and rebarbative. Few people are interested in Coleridge nowadays; many fewer have any interest in neo-Latin culture (especially this late in the day—I mean, the day of neo-Latin culture: the nineteenth-century was the last gasp of any serious European Latinity). And the crossover between those two groups is minuscule. And that's the target audience I'm going for with these posts. Onward!